On 2020-12-02 18:19, Ashton Fagg wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm currently in the process of provisioning a new NAS for home. It's > replacing an older Synology unit that ticks me off in so many ways. > > I am looking to hear other's experiences with using OpenBSD as a NAS - > specifically in terms of reliability, and for suggestions on how to > provision my storage. > > I have an LSI card (supported by the drivers in OpenBSD) that is > currently flashed to IT mode, but it can of course flashed back to the > IR firmware which lets it act as a hardware RAID controller. > > My needs for the NAS are as follows: NFS and Samba share support, > reasonable performance, some amount of tolerance to disk failure, > reliable and trustworthy software and file system, ability to closely > monitor disk/array health. By extension, it should also be as simple as > possible. > > It might be nice to have it be able to host an iSCSI volume, but that's > not essential. > > I don't care about bleeding edge performance, fancy web UIs or any other > "shiny" stuff. > > By my estimates, OpenBSD with softraid volumes should tick all of those > boxes. The box will do nothing else besides be a file server. OpenBSD is > my preferred OS nowadays, but I am open to something else if it's the > best tool for the job. I guess I'm trying to find out if there's any > compelling reason why I *shouldn't* use OpenBSD with softraid. > > (ZFS also scares me, btw. Maybe unjustifiably so, but it seems very > complex and I suspect much of the hype comes down to zealotry and > fanboyism.)
that was my ZFS experience. That, and the regular, "$PRODUCT is the answer, what was your question?". ZFS is one of those $PRODUCTs... > The questions I have are: > > a) Is softraid reliable enough to support my use-case? Does anyone have > anecdotes to encourage/discourage use of softraid for this application? I've been using it in various ways for many years. I'm happy with it. HOWEVER, before you go live, build an array. Replace a disk. Rebuild the array. Basically do everything you might someday have to do in an emergency...do it now before you load your data. > b) Would I be better off using the LSI RAID controller for the arrays? One, no. Two, maybe. Nice thing about software RAID in general is it's hw agnostic. If your system dies, it's easy to move your drives to another machine, maybe with very different hw (for example, I've moved Softraid between pcide(4) systems and ahci(4) systems. Just works). With HW raid, you really HAVE to have a spare RAID card on the shelf ready to do use in case your existing one fails. You won't plug your old drives into another card and have them recognized. HW RAID can be fast. It /can/ be easily managed in OpenBSD if bioctl recognizes your controller. But it is very dependent on the underlying hw. It can also bite you in the butt if it turns out to be quirkier than you expected. I can make a very good case for both HW and SW RAID -- and at this point in my life, if anyone tells you one is absolutely the answer, I'm going to say this person lacks some experience. > c) Bearing in mind that the provisioning scheme I have in mind is to > provision the disks in pairs (forming RAID1 arrays), thus resulting in > 3-4 separate volumes (6-8 disks), is there any reason I should *not* use > OpenBSD, and look more toward something like TrueNAS or FreeBSD? If your weapon of choice is OpenBSD, you will be happy using OpenBSD softraid, much more than trying to pick up another OS for a theoretical advantage. I like your plan. With Softraid, your entire disk should be one RAID array. You can then slice up that RAID array into sub partitions. (i.e., other software RAID systems are different -- for example, Solaris would mirror individual partitions, rather than entire disks). Keeping your arrays simple means your data is more likely to be there when things go wrong (and they always do). > (Before anyone mentions it - Yes, I have a proper backup system. I do > not rely on the redundancy provided by RAID arrays in lieu of a real > backup. I have both a local backup and offsite backup.) Good. :) Nick.
